The present invention relates to an apparatus for covering a tire bead with a tape so that deformation may not arise in the tire bead.
As a tape covering technique for a bead, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 52-2433 (1977) was proposed in the prior art. According to this proposed technique, a tape is successively stuck onto an outer circumferential surface of a bead, both side edge portions of the tape are folded back step by step and stuck to the bead gradually from the side surfaces of the bead to the inner circumferential surface thereof, and to that end, drive rollers for gradually folding back a tape are successively arrayed from the upstream side to the downstream side.
Accordingly, a great many drive rollers are necessitated, as the rollers for folding back the tape a six rollers are necessitated, and further, pinch rollers or the like for pressing the tape are required. Since these fold-back rollers are all driven, the driving system becomes complex. In addition, a part of the fold-back rollers have flanges along both of their edges and would fold back the tape so as to pinch the bead from the opposite sides thereof. However since the flanges are fixed to the roller by means of setscrews, the apparatus cannot versatilely deal with distribution of the widths of the beads, which causes inconveniences such as no-good insert, no-good take-out or the like. Moreover, when the apparatus is switched to beads having a different size, adjustment of an interval between the flanges is always necessitated, so that a lot of labor and time are required for the switching work. This becomes also a bar against automation of take-out of the beads.